Rashel Veprinski (1896-1981) was born in the town of Ivankov, not far from Kiev, in Ukraine. She came to New York in 1907, and at thirteen she went to work in a shop. At fifteen, she began writing poetry, and was first published in 1918 in the journal Di naye velt (The New World). She wrote several books of poetry, among them Ruf fun foygl (The Call of the bird), 1926, Di Palitre (The palette), 1964, Tsum eyntsikn shtern (To the single star), 1971 as well as an autobiographical novel , short stories, and articles and was published regularly in Yiddish periodicals. From the 1920s until his death in 1953, she lived with the famous Yiddish writer Mani Leyb.

For the first post I have chosen Rashel Veprinski’s poem “Frum” (Piously) because the blog gets it name Candles of Song from the last line of that poem.

For joy and for sorrow,
For aging wit.
God, put the word of your mouth
Into mine.

The word not yet bloomed,
That sleeps in the stone, in the dust down below,
Wake it up, let it blossom forth anew
As if in the flowerbed,
In the line-harvest of my poems.

And the pain and the woe, and the grief of the world,
I put before you, in your presence –
Piously as my mother the waxen wicks,
I light my candles of song.Di palitre (The palette), Israel, 1964
Tr. Sheva Zucker

Dear Sheva,
What a rich and deep and interesting poem, thank you so very much for bringing it to us.

It made me think of two things:

1. When she asks God to give her His Word, from his mouth to hers, it is a very effective and beautiful allusion to Jeremiah 1:9 : “Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said unto me: Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth…”, and perhaps also to Isaiah 6:6: “Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, with a glowing stone in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar; and he touched my mouth with it, and said: Lo this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin expiated. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said: ‘Here am I; send me”.
It seems to me to equate her, the poet, with the two great prophets, in the sense of having a very grave mission and responsibility, carrying the Word of God, and in the sense of being in a very close and intimate touch with God (His “angezicht”, which I did not find in the dictionary, only found “gezicht” as “countenance”, and I’m curious what that “an” is doing there, besides the rhythmic function… By the way, the presence of God brings to mind yet another great prophet: Moses, who was the only one to be so close to God’s “gezicht”, and who spoke to God face to face). I hope and expect to read more of her poems to see if she really actualized this promise, the prophetic mission, which must bring to the people not only flowery words but also hard truths; and to see the blossoming of her words (how beautiful the analogy of poem-lines and garden-bed lines.)

2. When she talks of her poems as not yet in full blossom, still asleep in the stone (like the form of a statue before the sculptor chips away the stone around it, which makes her an Artist, not just a prophet) and still in the dust, it brought to my mind immediately a poem I love very much by the Russian poet Marina Tzvetayva, where she too talks about her poems as not yet “in full bloom”, also lying in the dust. Being from the Ukraine, I’m almost sure Veprinski read Tzvetayva, who was only 4 years older than her, and to me, at least, this is almost a response, a very Jewish response, to Tzvetayva’s poem about her budding poetry.
I’m enclosing the poem below, with a better translation than I could make, which I found on the Internet, with just a few slight changes I made, since I do read Russian, to make it more literally precise (because it shows another parallel between the poems: Veprinski talks of her poems dealing with joy and grief, and Tzvetayeva talks about hers dealing with youth and death).The relevant lines are in red.
I hope you like the poem and agree with me that it might have some relevance. If not, please don’t hesitate to debate it with me.
Thank you so much,
Naomi

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1913)

My poems, written so early
That I didn’t even know I was a poet,
Which flew off, like drops from a fountain,
Like sparks from the plume of a rocket,

Which burst, like tiny devils,
Into a sanctuary of frankincense and sleep,
My poems, of youth and death,
—My poems, still unread!—

Scattered in the dust in bookstores,
(Where no one’s bought them, no one buys),
My poems, like casks of precious vintage,
Will have their day at last.

Thank you, Naomi, for these very helpful comments. I am also studying the poems on Sheva’s wonderful blog and would appreciate hearing from you when you comment on the poems. My email address is: batya@jewishfolksongs.com.